Theme 5: An Ongoing Experience of Meaningful
Referring to the status of the Black pastor, Barry also adds,
I certainly do think that, if you go back to days of slavery, compared to White people, who were the slave owners, they didn’t place as much weight on the
preacher or the church service. And there is a contextual reason for the reverence for the pastor in the Black community. It was because, in that context, the one who was the pastor was generally the one who could read. And so he was positioned amongst the others as elevated, as a picture of success, as the ideal; everybody’s trying to get to his status.
Leo, who serves on the leadership team at Park Street, described the phenomenon this way:
In the Black church, the people put the Pastor on a pedestal. It is the culture in most African-American churches. For example, T.D. Jakes and Creflo Dollar. They do this thing where it’s almost like when you go to a concert, and the person on stage never comes into the audience. He goes to the side of the stage. So what happens?
The people want to come see him again. It’s the mindset because the people put him up on a pedestal. So, like the Catholics put the Pope on pedestal, the Black church does the same to the pastor.
These past experiences not only made a mark on these leaders, but they also learned from their past experiences the dangers of having so much authority and
influence residing in one person. This concept was illustrated when Charles recounted his experience of being in leadership at a previous church. He recalls,
I was already going to the church for eight years prior. And I served in leadership from 2003 to 2019. I didn’t see myself going anywhere else. Unfortunately, the church closed, because our Senior Pastor had multiple moral affairs. He was my mentor. It was hard because I had lived with them prior to getting married. So, I saw him as a father and a big brother, a spiritual mentor. All the above. I saw the church grow from 15 adults to over 5000 adult members. We had four services on Sunday. I learned a lot there. And the whole experience shaped me in a big way.
All these past experiences of the top-down church leadership model had a shaping effect on these participating leaders. They had seen the dangers up close and personal. Their lives had been directly affected by the failures of the leaders at the top. In some cases, their faith had been shaken and eventually strengthened by the events
after him in Atlanta. So many of these personalities loom large, the people who sit on the board of the NAACP. These guys are all men of faith. And even if Christianity is not your cup of tea, the other big luminaries in Black community, like Malcolm X, he’s a religious man. Right? And so religion and right sizing justice, they’re riding in the car together. Yeah, and they’re inseparable in Black mind.
surrounding the problems with the top-down model. These past experiences made them want to be part of a different model that would be less authoritarian and more
collaborative. The alternative to the top-down leadership structure is the shared
leadership model. This model is known for its emphasis on a plurality of leaders. Dave Harvey states, “The Bible rarely talks about stand-alone leaders. Instead, it speaks of plurality. When I use the term plurality, I’m referencing the scriptural evidence that New Testament churches were led by more than one leader. They were, in fact, led by
leadership teams.”18 The leadership team approach characterized each of the participating churches. Shared leadership allowed for a greater presence of collaboration and
teamwork.
The Importance of Mutual Accountability
The second aspect of meaningful collaboration is the importance of mutual accountability. George Yancey most recently developed the meaning of this term in his book Beyond Racial Division. Explaining the essence of this model, Yancey states,
[The Mutual Accountability Model] stipulates that we work to have healthy interracial communications so that we can solve racial problems. In those communications we strive to listen to those in other racial groups and attempt to account for their interests. In this way we fashion solutions to racialized problems that address the needs of individuals across racial groups instead of promoting solutions that are accepted only by certain racial groups. By allowing those we disagree with to hold us “accountable” to their interests, we are forced to confront the ways we have fashioned solutions that conform to our own interests and desires.19
In contrast to the mutual accountability model that Yancey writes about, Warren recalls how the Black church is accustomed to falling in line with whatever the Pastor decides.
He describes it as the Godfather effect.
The Black pastor has a very godfather-type role. There’s a very Don Corleone feel to the Black pastor role. So, if I am a Pastor in an exclusively Black context, there
18 Dave Harvey, The Plurality Principle (Cocoa Beach, FL: Crossway, 2021), 25. Kindle.
19 Yancey, Beyond Racial Division, 35.
are things that I would never have to negotiate or create a compelling reason for people to do something to mobilize. I could just literally say, “This is what we’re doing.” And people would respond, “All right.”
However, in a multi-racial leadership model, it is vitally important to have a healthy presence of mutual collaboration. For collaboration to be present, mutual accountability must occur. Speaking of the importance of this, Barry says,
Historically speaking, a Black person is more hesitant to add his opinion to the conversation because when a Black person enters the room, there is an expectation of assimilation, not true collaboration. A Black person on a multiethnic team will tend to wait, hold back, and not be as forthcoming and open about their view and their perspective because of the conditioning that has happened from being in the minority culture. So, in order to have real collaboration, you have to people who have a real security in who they are that, in being inside of a context where you are able to say for example, “We always sing that song, but I don’t like it.” Able to say that, knowing they are going to be the oddball, and wondering if that is because they are the minority.
The team members must be able to speak the truth in such a way as to allow those who see things differently to hold others accountable to their interests respectfully. Barry says,
“Sometimes collaboration is squelched when a person shies away in an effort to appease because they don’t want to hurt the other team member, or don’t want to come across as racists.”
Yancey believes that the key to this type of accountability is active listening, which he describes as “when we actively listen, we have a responsibility to rephrase what the other person is saying in such a way that they agree we have captured their ideas honestly.20 Illustrating this principle of active listening, William shares,
We lead by consensus. We have a little system that we call green, amber, red. And so when we’re talking about something or an idea, we’ll just check in with one another.
“Are you a green, amber, or red on this issue or decision?” “Well, I’m green.” “I’m green.” Then we go. But other times, when I am green, and he is amber, I will say,
“OK. Tell me more about what you’re thinking.” What I mean by consensus is not unanimity. We don’t have to have full agreement on things. If we’re not both fully green, it does not mean we don’t move. We don’t have to have unanimity, but we do need to have consensus, and we just talk all the time, yes, we have a meeting where we talk through issues. But in reality, we talk and listen to one another all the time.
20 Yancey, Beyond Racial Division, 41.
The Value of Meaningful Collaboration
Listening to one another leads to meaningful collaboration. Collaborative teamwork, as compared to singular leadership, requires a close fellowship where each person is seeking to understand one another. These churches practiced this regularly and meaningfully.
This is what collaborative conversation is about. It is about learning to work together to find solutions most of us can accept. It is developing a connection with others by building an overarching identity where it is not us versus them but just us working together. It is learning we cannot get everything. Indeed, any group that gets everything will sow seeds of resistance among other groups. This means the winning group must either find ways to oppress and take away the rights of those who resist or watch that resistance sabotage their efforts. Collaborative conversation means differentiating what we need from what we want in our demands so we can give up the latter to receive support for the former.21
Meaningful collaboration requires commitment where it is not us versus them but just us working toward a common goal. This collaborative work was on full display when the multi-racial leadership team of Perimeter Church decided they needed to
publish a position statement indicating where they stood on racial issues. To make a point of the painstaking difficulty of this process, Brady recalls,
We strongly agreed that we needed to write a statement of where the church stands culturally and biblically on some of the current racial issues. And so, we wrote a statement collectively called a “Statement on Systemic Racism and Injustice.” It’s about two or three pages long. And it’s really a theological walk through the word of why we believe in the word of God and how it applies to race relations and justice.
But it was hard. We painstakingly went through that as an elder leadership team.
And then we took it to our staff team and wanted them to walk through, chew on it, talk through it, and wrestle with it. Because truth-telling is very challenging.
The difficulty was not only in the process of understanding one another but also in giving voice to the truth of what was happening all around us. Meaningful collaboration does not turn away from reality. Rather, collaborative work requires the courage and grace to go to difficult realities and talk about them. Not only did Perimeter discover the difficulty in talking about racial issues, it also experienced the challenge of working toward an agreement on what it all meant. Brady continues,
21 Yancey, Beyond Racial Division, 111-112.
The most intense pain was coming to an agreement on the wording of the statement.
We discovered that we all can come to an agreement on a verse in the Bible. But then, as we dissected the verse and tried to explain where we stand as a church in a cultural context, we collectively wrote those words together and had to agree on them. That was hard. It took us about four months of diligent collaboration. We thought it would be a lot easier and come a lot quicker, but it didn’t. It was very challenging, and it was challenging because our White majority staff and elders thought it would be simple, until our Black brothers and sisters on our staff and our elders said, “Whoa, time out. Wait a minute. We need to really concentrate on these words because words are very important, and they can be offensive even though you don’t mean them to be.” So there was a lot of intercultural learning between White and Black just in writing that statement.
The key to this type of meaningful collaboration is simply to consider the interests of others, which is where the accountability element is critical. If multi-racial leadership teams want to find solutions that serve the interests of everyone, each member of the team must listen to everyone. They must learn to consider the interests and
perspectives of each other and allow each other to articulate those interests and
perspectives in their own words. Rather than the top-down dictator model of determining the best conclusions and rationalizing why those solutions are best for everyone, mutual accountability obligates each person on the team to gain the input of others so that their concerns are heard and incorporated into whatever path the team decides to take. When each person’s concerns are factored into the decision, this inevitably leads to
compromise, which is the next theme that emerged from the interview findings.
While George Yancey’s writings add tremendous value and insight to the topic of meaningful and productive collaboration in the church, his material does not focus much at all on the dynamics of collaboration among multi-racial church leadership. This research found that significant and constructive collaboration among multi-racial leaders was a key element in the team’s effectiveness.
Theme 6: A Genuine Willingness toward